Reflecting on Marshall Plan, it strikes me that distasteful as it might seem to both sides, Blue America needs to craft a Marshall unPlan for Red America to avert a Cold War. It’s an 1830-project Jacksonian honor society that feels humiliatingly dependent on blue tax dollars. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1286523087437983744

The political-cultural war obscured the central truth of neoliberalism: Blue America overwhelmingly won an economic war ironically thanks to the way Reagan set up the post-Nixonian economic chessboard.

Red America is economically moribund, living off subsidized commodity industries half of which are under threat due to the energy transition, and automation. Culturally it years for 1830. Economically it has nothing left in the tank except a wishful fantasy of dominating China.

Their *best* utopia is that China continues to buy hogs and soybeans and leaves just enough manufacturing here based on obsolete machinery to let it feel technologically needed.

This is.... grim. Not a future I’d want to stay alive for.

They’ve seemingly given up all hope of participation in any economic activity that has emerged since about 1985. They use computers but act like they wish the PC and everything that came after hadn’t been invented at all. It’s odd to not feel at least a little excitement about it

unPlan because what Red America *has* right now is something like a 1980s vintage Marshall Plan. It’s a bad 1940s vintage plan based on a self-template mix of trying to install the free market via a command economy. https://twitter.com/mwiik/status/1307394786895245315?s=21

It was an advanced idea for 1948. It was a bad idea for 1985 that created a dysfunctional Red welfare state that aimed to prop up dignity without creating any real economic agency. In 2020 it is a hopelessly bad model.

West Germany at least emerged as modern techno-economic powerhouse out of the ruins of WW2 thanks to the Marshall Plan. Nothing like it has emerged out of the 80s devastation of Red America. An unPlan is needed that builds real economic agency instead of flattering Red conceits.

My unit of analysis for this is “Red donuts and blue holes”

It’s more an urban-suburban-rural divide than states vs states. It only looks like a states vs states cold war because of the US electoral system.

Post-Covid migration patterns are an opportunity for economic healing

Marshall Plan helped create the Cold War. Reaganomics helped create the US Civil Cold War with Red America cast as the USSR. It’s now morphing into a hot Civil War with McConnell as Red America’s Putin.

For 25 years young people with ambition were sneaking across a domestic cultural equivalent of Berlin Wall to seek economic opportunities and lives in Blue America. Now it’s an endgame but a confused echo of 1989. Is SCOTUS = Germany? Just being reunified from the losing end?

Nice thing is they already think we’re smug, patronizing assholes and all we do is cultural Marxist pedophilia rings selling out the country to China-ass-kissing globalists. No cred left to lose. The red caricature of blue makes the blue caricature of red look like literature.

I find that Red America is deeply caught up in a “decline of the west” neo-spenglerian narrative with no desire to even look for a shared new common humanity narrative. They see no place for themselves on a world that the west doesn’t unilaterally dominate.

Hence the vulnerability to simple racism. Globalism was fine so long as globe was defined as Europe+Not#rth America.